The Sun's not yellow it's chicken

• There’s a difference in getting an experienced professional familiar with a workflow, and training someone from the ground up and paying for their equipment - especially for smaller, leaner businesses that don’t have bloated profit margins to fall back on. Costs rack up easily. Forcing a minimum wage will mean that private enterprises will not be able to pay a small wage plus give extensive training to an individual who does not already possess those qualifications/experience - hence the job/experience cycle.

The problem is, a “Training wage” is also known as a “Hire them & fire them” wage.

One example was a friend of mine who had a minimum wage job at Harvard University. This was a job she loved doing, something she didn’t necessarily do for money (until she lost her “Real” job and suddenly needed the money). Anyhow, Harvard got rid of her (and all the other paid staff) because of a federal program meant to help students. See, the government would subsidize Harvard to give the job to a student, so the choice was between a minimum wage permanent staff or the constant turn-around of a subsidized staff. They immediately went with the money.

Another great example was Dubya Bush’s insane, anti family “Registry” for companies that wanted to hire illegal aliens. Under that plan, any company that offered “jobs that Americans don’t want” could register them with the federal system and qualify to use much cheaper illegal alien labor. But, get this:

They defined “Jobs Americans don’t want” by the pay and not by the type of work. So all a company had to do was lower their pay to a point where people weren’t applying for the jobs and they could exploit all the cheap illegal alien labor that they wanted!

One company profiled — a business that had “jobs Americans don’t want” — was a builder down in Georgia. The company constructed homes. Now these should have been paying good money, but the owner was paying only $8 an hour FOR CONSTRUCTION! Most people in the industry received as much or more in unemployment as they would BEFORE TAXES working for this evil maggot. Anyhow, he claimed the had no choice but to hire illegal aliens, because Americans didn’t want those jobs. In reality, Americans didn’t want to be exploited, didn’t want to work for far less than market rate… less than they could collect on unemployment.

Fact is, if you have a sub minimum wage then salaries will drop. If a business can’t afford a new truck, or to buy a building or hire an employee, that’s too bad but there’s nothing you or I can or should do about it. It’s no different than if, say, you wanted to buy a new car or home but couldn’t afford it. You save & save until you can, or you make different plans.

Exploitation hurts the economy. The economy is like a ship, you can’t sink just part of it. The money I get is what creates jobs (goods and services) elsewhere. The greater my spending power, the more jobs I create, the more it all snowballs. Putting additional downward pressure on wages is not going to help anyone.

Customers create jobs. If you have a job then thank a customer. And, yes, everyone has customers, though sometimes (like in large companies) the customers are internal — they’re other employees or departments. Still it’s true: Customers create jobs. If you want to create jobs in the auto industry, create more customers looking to buy cars. Lowering salaries does not do this. Quite the opposite. By lowering salaries you reducing the strength of the customer — you need a lot more just to have the same bounce, and even then you’ll likely starve off luxury makers/retailers.